July 1st 2019 my girlfriend and me got our house in Viborg. The house was build i 2007 and was installed with IHC (ELKO Living system in Norway and Sweden). My previous house wasn’t that smart, but at that point I used Philips Hue to create some automations with the lights. With IHC in the house I thought it would be cool – now it was time for a real smart home.
Quite quickly I however found out that IHC today is just not enough. I requires a lot of knowledges around IHC Visual, which is an older system, and it’s not so easy to integrate with other smart products.
For some years ago I became familiar with Home Assistant, and I saw that it has an integration to the IHC platform, so I thought this was the right way to start building our future smart home, where automations, routines etc. would be a part of our every day. I began the journey with Home Assistant in October/November 2019.
The focus for me when I looked for a smart home system was:
- It should be able to integrate to our existing IHC platform.
- It should be easy to integrate to a lot of different smart home products, so we wouldn’t be limited to only purchase specific smart home products.
- It shouldn’t be too time consuming to do simple things in the system, but still have a lot of possibility to handle our use cases with automations, rulesets etc.
- The system should have a related app for iPhone (and Android), so it would be easy for my girlfriend to use aswell.
Home Assistant has been the right choice for us so far. It contains a lot of good documentation, it’s easy to extend and create use cases on and it has a quite big community around it, where people share knowledge, solutions and help with issues. The last part is very important because it also help newcomers into the platform.
Especially the last part is also one of the reasons why I have chosen to write some posts around Home Assistant on my little blog. I’ve tried a few times before with a blog, but it always ended up in dying shortly after, mainly because of lack of time and subjects. But now I have something interesting to tell and show with our use of Home Assistant.
So dear ready, I hope you will find my experience useful. You are more than welcome to come with feedback and spread the word around my blog.
Here at the end I would like to do a big shout out to the Facebook-group “Dansk Home Assistant Gruppe“, where I have found a lot of inspiration and ideas, but also help from others when I have had issues or problems. The group is primarily for Danish people, so if you are a Dane starting up on Home Assistant this is a must-have group.
/Kristian